Cultural Implications Of The Professionalization Of Sport

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Finally, I will discuss the social and cultural implications of the professionalization of sport. In this paragraph I will look at how the professionalization and commercialization of sport through radio and sports broadcasting has led to sports becoming more of a social practice, and as well has led to a “fan culture”. “Technology has the power to affect not only education but also culture, religion and personal thoughts and beliefs. While the world population is continually growing, our global world seems to be getting smaller as we are able to connect to people in a way that was never imagined. Radio and television were among the early contributors to this new form of mass media and played a role in affecting world political views” . This …show more content…

With the emergence of “fans” we get a sense of how much sports journalism helped professionalize sport but as well make it a more social practice. The most important factor of sports journalism is the representation of how the sporting discourse connects with wider social, political and economic discourses. The sports articles that are made through sports journalism help make sport a more social practice because it reconstitutes aspects of national and cultural identities. For example hockey is continuously said to be a Canadian game, and baseball and football are looked at as American sports. Not only do the technological innovations help set up cultural values and tradition for specific countries, but as well set up specific sports to have a national identity. Overall, sports journalism has impacted sports in a positive way in that it has made people more aware of sports going on around them. The more modern sport had become the more important the audience or the “fan” had become. In the book Sports Fans, Identity, and Socialization: Exploring the Fandemonium they discuss how important the emergence of media has become to the socialization of

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